After my recent posting about Quick, Draw, I have been looking at related tool called AutoDraw. This is another Google tool that uses AI. Rather than trying to draw something the machine can recognise, here you draw something and the machine offers to turn it into a much neater looking icon or sketch. I imagine it is using similar technology but putting it to a different end.

This isn’t the acme of sketching but, as an experiment with a visually orientated search engine for finding little bits of clip art, it is potentially useful and certainly fascinating. I wonder how far it will go though? Perhaps one day someone will come up with a guitar that you can “play” just by waving your hands over the neck (or a functional air guitar)… although that will beg the question of how much is really “you” in the playing.

Still, while there are levels where it falls short of what can be achieved by a human with a bit of gumption, I am sure there are other applications where such tools will let us reach further than we ever could before.